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SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 



COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 
SALES AGENTS 

New York 

LEMCKE & BUEGHNER 

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London 
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30 North Szechuen Road 



SOME WAK-TIME LESSONS 

THE SOLDIER'S STANDARDS OF CONDUCT 

THE WAR AS A PRACTICAL TEST OF 
AMERICAN SCHOLARSHIP 

WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED? 



BY 

FREDERICK PAUL KEPPEL 

THIRD ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF WAR 



•nil* 




COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 

1920 

All rights reserved 






Copyright, 1920 
By Columbia University Press 



Printed from type, January, 1920 



FE8 24 ia20 



PRINTED AT 
THE 'PLIMPTON 'PRESS 
NORWOOD' MASS 'U'S'A 



©aA559819 



TO 

NEWTON D. BAKER 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I. The American Soldier and His Standards 

OF Conduct 9 

II. The War as a Practical Test of Ameri- 
can Scholarship 36 

III. What Have We Learned? 66 



SOME WAE-TIME LESSONS 

THE AMERICAN SOLDIER AND HIS 
STANDARDS OF CONDUCT ^ 

Perhaps the greatest laboratory experiment 
in human conduct in the history of the world 
has been the development of our Army during 
the past two years. Under the provisions of 
the Selective Service Law, this Army has rep- 
resented a cross section of American male 
humanity — even more representative indeed 
than was intended ; for in the efforts of the 
Local Boards to send men who could best be 
spared, many found their way into the ranks who 
were handicapped from the start by low men- 
tality or disease. What were the guiding forces 
which operated upon this body of nearly four 
million men? 

In the first place, our country entered the 
war with a great moral purpose, untinged by 

^ An address delivered at the one hundredth anniversary of 
the General Theological Seminary, New York, April 30, 1919. 

9 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

any trace of national or individual selfishness. 
We really have to go back to the Crusades to 
find the like. And, as then, each man sup- 
plemented this great basal impulse with 
whatever was to him the strongest incentive — 
religion, patriotism, pride of family or state 
or regiment, the desire to excel in what all 
were attempting. 

In the second place, thanks primarily to the 
vision and determination of one man, the in- 
dividual appeal to each soldier as to his per- 
sonal share in the great enterprise was upon 
the highest plane. We were fortunate in having 
at the head of the War Department a man 
peculiarly sensitive to community problems 
and with no small experience in their solution. 
Through the centuries men had come to the 
belief that if their soldiers were only valiant and 
disciplined in arms, it would not do to inquire 
too curiously into their personal standards of 
conduct in other matters — that a considerable 
wastage in military strength from drunkenness 
and disease was inevitable. And as we all 
know, this wastage has in the past sapped, not 
only the strength of the Army, but afterwards 
the very life of the nation to which the soldier 
must sooner or later return. 

10 



THE AMERICAN SOLDIER 

The Secretary of War and his lieutenants, 
chief among whom in this field should be placed 
the Chairman of the Committee on Training 
Camp Activities, Raymond B. Fosdick, ap- 
proached this problem neither in the fatalistic 
spirit that what has always been must continue 
to be, nor in a spirit of what, for want of a 
better term, I may call doctrinaire idealism. 
They faced the fact that among the hundreds 
of thousands of young men who were to be 
called to the colors, there would be many whose 
ears would be deaf to any abstract appeal, 
and many others to whom such an appeal might 
be made under normal conditions, but who in 
fatigue or the let-down following the strain of 
conflict, could not be depended upon to stand 
in the hour of temptation. As a result the 
whole field of preventive measures was thor- 
oughly studied and vigorous treatment was 
applied. The Army regulations as to prophy- 
laxis and the introduction of intoxicants into 
camps were strictly and honestly enforced. 
The Army saw to it that state and local laws 
as to liquor and prostitution were properly 
carried out, and if these were lacking, they 
were promptly enacted. The so-called Zone 
Law was adopted for the purpose of placing 

11 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

the immediate vicinity of camps under Federal 
control. In some cases where the community 
showed signs of regarding the Army policy in 
this regard as a beau geste and nothing more, it 
was made to realize that while the War De- 
partment could not compel the community to 
mend its ways, it could and would move the 
camp in twenty-four hours to a more wholesome 
environment. I am proud to say that it was 
necessary in only a very few instances to bring 
forward this aspect of the situation, but when it 
was necessary the Department spoke in no 
uncertain tone. 

As a result of this general policy, in which 
the Navy shared, many a wide-open town 
received a thorough house cleaning for the first 
time in its career; in all between 120 and 140 
red light districts were closed and kept closed; 
and the underlying sordidness of many a smug 
self-satisfied village was brought to light and 
remedied. 

The men who came to the camps tainted with 
venereal disease or broken by drink or mor- 
phine — and the number of these was great 
enough to shock our national complacency (and 
incidentally to explode the national assumption 
that the country is primarily the abode of 

12 



THE AMERICAN SOLDIER 

virtue as the city is of vice) — these men were 
salvaged by the tens of thousands and turned 
into useful self-respecting soldiers and citizens. 

The lesson of clean living was taught by the 
spoken word, by the moving picture, by the 
printed page, by the doctor with a scientific 
thoroughness and by the layman with a frank- 
ness and sometimes a colloquialism which would 
for once have rendered Mrs. Grundy speechless. 
As an instrument of virtue, the tract is, of 
course, of time-honored usage, but the name of 
George Ade in the list of tract writers is a new 
and significant one. 

More important than all this, however, in 
my judgment, was the realization by the Army 
of the great truth that the soldier — or any 
one else for that matter — goes astray in only 
the rarest instances from innate depravity. 
What he seeks primarily is relaxation and 
amusement. And so wholesome relaxation and 
amusement were placed at his disposal to take 
the place of the unwholesome. The whole 
nation rose to help in this work of substituting 
the clean for the unclean. It poured its money 
by the hundreds of millions into the coffers of 
the great welfare societies, the Red Cross, The 
Young Men's Christian Association, Knights of 

13 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

Columbus, Jewish Welfare Board, and later 
in recognition of its work abroad, the Salvation 
Army. All of these vied with one another in a 
rivalry which was sometimes embarrassing in 
its intensity. The American Library Associa- 
tion supplied books and other reading matter, 
and the War Camp Community Service made 
sure that, to the towns and villages surround- 
ing it, a cantonment presented an opportunity 
for service rather than for exploitation. Not 
the least important factor in the superb showing 
which our troops made in France was the spirit 
with which the men and women of these same 
towns inspired the men from the training camps 
whom they took into their homes and their 
hearts. 

Within the fabric of the Army the chaplains 
were doing their share, as were the athletic 
leaders and song leaders and dramatic coaches. 
They were seconded by the officers of the line, 
most of whom, it should be said, saw the mili- 
tary usefulness of the whole program from the 
first, many of the experienced regulars having 
always done what they could with the limited 
means at their command along the same lines. 
Other officers, however, had to be shown — 
and were shown — the military importance of 

14 



THE AMERICAN SOLDIER 

the truth that the merry heart goes all the day, 
and the sad one tires in a mile. 

The work of planning and coordination was 
in the hands of the civilian Commission on 
Training Camp Activities, of which Mr. Fosdick 
has been from the first the Chairman. The 
work of this Commission has been characterized 
from the outset by a courage and resourceful- 
ness for which no praise can be too high. The 
theatre for example has not always been looked 
upon by the American people as a moral agency, 
but the Commission saw its place in the scheme 
of things and no fewer than thirty-seven great 
playhouses have been erected at the camps and 
the audiences have run literally into the mil- 
lions. Boxing likewise was encouraged, even 
though some of the contests which resulted 
were not of the most gentle. Cantonment 
towns were persuaded to open the '^Movies" 
on Sunday, the only day on which most soldiers 
could leave the Camp — the outcries of the 
unco guid to the contrary notwithstanding. 

For more than a year the Commission and 
the welfare organizations were the only or- 
ganized forces in this general field, but since 
last summer their work has been supplemented 
by the establishment within the Army itself 

15 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

of a Morale Branch of the General Staff, in 
the formation of which the Department was 
not too proud to take a leaf — perhaps one 
should say a Blatt — from the Germans, who 
had already developed this type of organization 
to a high degree, under the direct supervision 
of General Ludendorff . 

I have spoken of the work of prevention, of 
the more important work of substitution, and 
I now come to the most important of all — 
the spirit of confidence which extended from 
top to bottom of the huge organization that the 
great mass of our men would go straight for 
the sake of going straight. We all instinctively 
couple the two words, ^'officer" and '^gentleman/' 
In the great Army which is now being dis- 
banded, its work having been so gloriously 
done, we find a new and enlarged conception, 
that of the soldier and gentleman. It was, I 
am certain, the preliminary assumption that 
an American soldier was also an American 
gentleman in all the fundamentals of that much- 
abused term, which was the great factor in 
keeping down the number of those who proved 
the contrary to so negligibly small a total. 

A few figures from the official records will 
16 



THE AMERICAN SOLDIER 

show what the result of this all has been. In 
1909, for instance, there were in the Army, in 
round numbers, 5500 court-martial convictions 
of enlisted men, out of a total of 75,000. For 
the fifteen months ending July 1, 1918, there 
were 11,500 convictions out of a total of 2,200,000 
enlisted men, the percentage in the twelve 
months of peace being 7.3 and in the fifteen 
months of war, .53, about one-fourteenth as 
great. The significance of these later figures 
cannot be appreciated without some knowledge 
of the underlying circumstances. One case I 
remember was that of a man who got drunk, 
spent his money and that of some fellow soldiers, 
and stayed absent without leave to earn money 
enough to repay his fellow soldiers and then 
returned to camp to take his medicine. What 
on the surface appears to be the cowardly crime 
of desertion was, in several instances of which 
I have personal knowledge, a misguided effort 
to get to the front, through enlistment under 
another name in some branch of the service 
which seemed to have an earlier prospect of 
getting over. In France there were many 
cases of desertion, but nearly all were from the 
rear to the front. The progressive success of 
the policy of keeping the soldier from strong 

17 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

drink, by the way, stands out in the figures, 
which show that early in the war one out of 
every twelve offenses charged included drunk- 
enness, but that this proportion dropped until 
the final figures were less than one in each thirty 
offenses, this including soldiers in France, where 
the soldier had to stand on his own feet unpro- 
tected by prohibition laws. 

The welfare program was, from the nature of 
the case, most effective among the men of the 
National Army, where it was possible to take 
the soldiers in hand from the first. If we 
analyze the court-martial records, we find that 
the proportion of court-martials was distinctly 
lowest in this group. The records as of June 30, 
1918, show that the number of court-martials 
among the Regular Army was a little less than 
one per cent, to be accurate tV of one per cent; 
in the National Guard the proportion was about 
yo of one per cent; and in the National Army 
it was less than yo of one per cent, the exact 
figure being .143 per cent, one-fiftieth of the 
percentage ten years ago. 

Another check on the efficiency of the pro- 
gram is found in the records as to venereal 
disease in the Surgeon General's Office. It is 
hard to get comparative figures because of con- 

18 



THE AMERICAN SOLDIER 

stantly changing conditions, but it has been 
shown beyond all doubt that the health con- 
ditions in the Army have been far, far better 
than in the community at large. While the 
latter are not so bad as the alarmists have im- 
plied, they are serious enough in all conscience, 
when in no fewer than seventeen of the states, 
sixty or more of every thousand men who 
appeared at the mobilization camps were found 
to be infected. Taking a typical month before 
the signing of the armistice, we find that the 
proportion of cases coming to the camps from 
the civil community was fifteen times as great as 
the proportion among our soldiers in France, 
even including the soldiers in the port towns, 
where most of our difficulties there were 
found. The comparison with the records of 
the cantonments in this country is even more 
striking. 

As to the purely religious appeal and its 
influence on the men it is hard to speak with 
any degree of certainty. A visiting British 
general in Washington, shortly after our entry 
into the war, was asked as to conditions in 
England, and is reported to have replied, ''Upon 
my soul, if you ask me, I should say that with 

19 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

us the dear old Church has rather missed the 
bus.'' In this country the organized reUgious 
forces have by no means missed the bus, but 
if we are honest with ourselves we must face 
the fact that since the last great national test, 
the Civil War, other appeals to higher standards 
of conduct have both actually and relatively 
been tremendously strengthened, and our re- 
ligious leaders must address themselves, in the 
light of experience during these past two years, 
to a clearer understanding of these other forces 
and to a closer cooperation with them. We 
cannot to-day close our eyes to the truth that 
many of our finest men played their splendid 
parts quite untouched by a religious motive 
or appeal — or at least doctrinal appeal; one 
hesitates to call their attitude a non-religious 
one. It must always be remembered, however, 
that their standards, no matter how unconscious 
they may have been of the fact, were funda- 
mentally based upon the development of a Chris- 
tian civilization. 

If thus far I may have seemed to measure 
soldier conduct by two standards only, by his 
relation to drink and to women, it is because 
the results of the policy of the Army in these 
two matters are measurable, the records are 

20 



THE AMERICAN SOLDIER 

outstanding. The Army and its experience 
however would furnish but a poor guide to the 
Churches and the other civiUan forces for 
righteousness if its lessons were limited to the 
negative virtues, important as they are, of 
sobriety and continence. 

The real contribution, what we have learned 
as to the positive virtues, is harder to describe 
and impossible to measure, but the lessons are 
worth looking for and may be learned from the 
letters and from the lips of our men. Perhaps 
I can best indicate what the men themselves 
regard as vital by telling the experience of a 
friend who started one of the customary prac- 
tical talks before an audience of our men be- 
hind the lines in France. His homily didn't 
seem to be '^getting across" and he was inspired 
to ascertain just what to their minds were the 
most serious offenses. He asked each man to 
write down what he regarded as the three very 
worst faults against which a soldier should be 
on his guard. When the answers were col- 
lected, one word appeared on practically every 
slip of paper, cowardice; the second was not 
so nearly unanimous, but appears on a strong 
majority of the papers, selfishness; and the 
third was evidently conceitedness, though the 

21 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

defect was worded in different ways, as big 
head, crust, and the like. 

In other words, the virtues which the soldier 
most admires and regarding which he had evi- 
dently learned the most valuable lessons, are 
courage, unselfishness or cooperativeness, and 
modesty. 

The record of our soldiers has proved beyond 
a doubt that once you get men into groups 
with a common and a worth-while purpose, 
courage — both the reckless courage that comes 
by instinct and that higher type, the courage 
of the man who recognizes his danger — can 
no longer be assumed to be a rare virtue. It 
is a very common virtue. Cowardice is in- 
finitely rarer. The citations and the casualty 
records, for instance, have completely rehabili- 
tated the Jew as a fighting man, and the faith- 
ful need no longer go back to Josephus for their 
war legends. 

Not all the courage and fortitude was shown on 
the field of battle. We must not forget that last 
fall we suffered from by far the most serious epi- 
demic in the history of America, and, in the 
dark days in our training camps, opportunities 
were offered, and gladly accepted, for a display 
of heroism and devotion of the highest type. 

22 



THE AMERICAN SOLDIER 

In the realm of fortitude, if not of physical 
courage, the war certainly tapped new sources 
of determination and provided a kind of stimu- 
lus which would keep a man to whom no per- 
sonal glory or conspicuousness could possibly 
come, some poor devil sentenced to a swivel 
chair, laboring in that same chair day and 
night for the purpose of making some single 
improvement in nut or bolt, or perhaps filing 
card. Given the impetus of a great common 
purpose, our possibilities for industry are 
limitless. 

One thing that mankind should have learned 
long since is that, broadly speaking, selfishness 
as a guiding motive is essentially negative — 
the absence of something better — the man is 
a rare exception who does not lose himself and 
his self-interest in the conception or the am- 
bition of the group, the squad or battalion or 
regiment, the division, the army or the nation. 
An interesting side-light upon this is the fact 
that two-thirds of the men who get into trouble 
in the Army, or at any rate who get into suffi- 
ciently serious trouble to land them in Fort 
Leavenworth, are markedly of the ego-centric 
type; in other words, are men for whom the 
group cannot overcome the individual bias. 

23 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

That our soldiers as a whole possess the 
virtue of modesty, though it is often overlaid 
by a veneer of innocent swagger, is beyond 
dispute, as any one who has had to do with 
them can testify. And underlying and inspir- 
ing their whole conduct have been the qualities 
of whole-souledness and determination and an 
indomitable cheerfulness. 

We must learn the lessons which the soldiers 
have to teach us in the large just as we must 
grasp their accomplishments in the large. There 
is a morning after for nations as well as for in- 
dividuals, and we seem just now to be in danger 
of losing our conception of the greatness of the 
enterprise, and its essential soundness, through 
the intrusion of the instances, relatively very 
few, where things did not go right; where 
human nature did not reach the heights, or 
having reached them, failed to remain upon 
them. 

It has, I think, been definitely proved that the 
mixing up of the so-called welfare work with 
the special function of the clergymen or other 
religious adviser, in order that the latter may 
be made more palatable to the soldier, has an 
effect exactly the reverse of what was intended. 

24 



THE AMERICAN SOLDIER 

The policy of interpolating a prayer meeting, 
or a heart-to-heart talk, between the third and 
fourth reels of the moving picture play, and I 
grieve to say that such a policy was actually 
followed for a while, is of course a fantastic 
example, but it shows exactly how we ought not 
to do it. 

The soldiers are peculiarly sensitive to any 
feeling that what is done for them is done for 
some other purpose than the ostensible one, 
entirely apart from how worthy such other 
purpose may be. Let me quote from a letter 
written by an officer of the Army who had been 
visiting a number of camps: 

''The Camp Library to my mind fulfills one 
of the most vital needs of the camp. It is a 
place where our men can get relaxation and 
mental stimulus, and where they can feel at 
ease without the ' God-bless-you ' atmosphere 
of the other welfare organizations. '\ . . ''It 
is the one place in camp where you can go and 
have a chance to meditate or read in peace and 
quiet without a piano jangling in your ears or 
the imminent possibility of a prayer meeting.'^ 

The chaplain or the lay religious worker to 
whom a man instinctively turned at the moment 
when he needed spiritual help was the one 

25 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

whom he had learned to respect for courage and 
devotion and dignity, the man who had helped 
to bury his dead friend, to comfort and amuse 
his wounded friend, and to advise his mis- 
guided friend in the guard-house; not the one 
whose ill-timed ministrations he had learned 
to avoid. I understand that the story of the 
chaplain who entirely forgot that he was to 
appear at a review for the purpose of receiving 
a medal and delayed the entire proceedings 
while he was sought for and found in his cus- 
tomary post in the connecting trench, is abso- 
lutely authentic. 

The man who could forget his denomination 
in his devotion to the great common mission 
was the man whom the soldier learned to love 
and to trust and who could do the most in the 
day of battle. The most popular tales among 
the chaplains are the tales of unorthodoxy: 
The Catholic priest who baptized a group of 
his men before action in a shell hole with water 
which was not only unblessed, but I fear un- 
sanitary, and who simply referred to Philip 
and the Eunuch when reproved; the Methodist 
and Baptist, and I think the Episcopalian, who 
in the absence of their Presbyterian colleague, 
solemnly and quite illegally received a youngster 

26 



THE AMERICAN SOLDIER 

into the Presbyterian fold before he went over- 
seas, and confessed the next morning to the 
Presbyterian Board; the Wesleyan chaplain in 
the British Army who carried a crucifix to com- 
fort the dying Catholics on the battlefield when 
no priest of their faith was near, and who 
administered the last rites to them as best he 
could. There are hundreds of such stories. 

The appeal of any denomination as such, or 
of the Y, or the corresponding societies of other 
faiths, as such, was always mistaken. It was 
the united appeal of all the doers of good deeds 
which counted. If we never knew before, we 
know now the truth of the fable of the bundle 
of fagots. Personally, I believe the united drive 
for welfare work last fall, during which Protest- 
ant, Catholic and Jew, and men of no formal 
religion whatever, appealed from the same plat- 
form for the same great purpose, was an event 
of the greatest importance in our nation, and it 
will go ill with us if we forget the lesson that 
it has to teach. 

The appeal must be not only disinterested, 
but it must be simple and direct. This, and the 
careful selection of its personnel, had much, 
if not most, to do with the extraordinary suc- 
cess of the Salvation Army. There are times 

27 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

in a soldier's life when the sewing on of a 
button at some vital spot will do more to "geV 
him than anything else in the world. 

Out of this spirit of general helpfulness, there 
were developed at almost every point the most 
beautiful and sympathetic adjustments to im- 
mediate conditions. For example, take the 
plan of showing moving pictures upon the ceil- 
ings of hospital wards, so that the very ill may 
enjoy them without the strain even of raising 
their heads. This small piece of thoughtfulness 
to me represents the standard of thinking a 
problem through which we will have to main- 
tain if we are to hold what we have gained, 
and what we have gained includes, or should 
include, a realization that active and willing 
loving-kindness furnishes the keenest of all 
pleasures. 

Thus far I have spoken mainly of the work of 
preparation in the United States. Overseas 
our soldiers and their officers found new condi- 
tions and were forced to make new adjustments. 
We no longer could control the laws and ordi- 
nances, and we found different standards of 
conduct — not necessarily lower standards, but 
different standards. We could no longer en- 

28 



THE AMERICAN SOLDIER 

force prohibition for example, but we did main- 
tain a high average of temperance. We showed 
our allies, some of whom I may say were hon- 
estly sceptical on the subject, that with our 
soldiers continence was the rule, and not the 
exception. When I was in France last year, 
I asked those who were in a position to know 
upon this point and was told that, comparatively 
speaking, very, very few of our men lowered in 
France the standards of conduct which they 
held when they came into the Army, that many 
more greatly improved those standards, either 
because of the lessons they had learned in our 
training camps, or because of the wholesome 
companionship of the women workers with 
whom they were daily brought in contact, or 
because, and this was probably the most potent 
factor of all, they were so desperately keen to 
get into the fighting line that they were taking 
no chances of being put out of commission 
beforehand. Their morality was the morality 
of the team in training for the big game, and it 
kept tens of thousands of boys straight. Indeed, 
until November 11, disciplinary problems may 
be said to have been practically non-existent 
among combat troops and almost negligible 
among the others. After the armistice was 

29 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

signed, there was a let-down, this being after 
all a very human body of young men, and the 
first remedy tried by some of the old-time 
regulars did not help a bit. This was to ''give 
'em plenty of drill and ma*k:e 'em so tired they 
won't have energy to get into mischief," but 
as one returning artillery officer pointed out to 
me, when a battery a month before has fired 
50,000 rounds of high-explosive at the Boche, 
and worked its guns over craters and through 
thickets, a drill with dummy ammunition on a 
parade ground is almost a justification for 
mutiny. Wiser counsel soon prevailed and the 
welfare work, which had slumped with the rest, 
was again brought up to concert pitch. It was 
for the first time in France, properly coordinated 
under Army control. The misfits and the 
workers who had worn themselves out were 
returned to this country and their places taken 
by fresh blood. I remember in this connection 
a paragraph tucked in the middle of the un- 
compromising officialdom of the daily depart- 
mental cable: ''Send over plenty of welfare 
workers and remember the best men you can 
send are the women." 

Let me take this chance to say a word about 
the criticisms we have been hearing of this 

30 



THE AMERICAN SOLDIER 

welfare work abroad. In the first place, the 
success of the work in this country among the 
men in training set up an expectation which 
it was humanly impossible to meet under the 
conditions overseas; in other words, the men 
who went over assumed standards as to the 
minimum amount of attention which it was 
their right to expect, the like of which had 
never been dreamed in the history of mankind. 
As a matter of fact, and taken as a whole, the 
treatment which they received was admirable 
and the comparatively few who now doubt the 
truth of this statement will come to realize it 
as time goes on. They will see that the mis- 
fits, the over-wrought, stood out in their minds 
like men out of alignment at parade, that they 
simply did not notice the thousands of men 
and women whose work for them was all that 
their own mothers could have asked. 

The following official cablegram records the 
state of educational, recreation and welfare 
work at the end of April, 1919. 

^'Educational activities: Roughly there are 
209,000 students embraced in this scheme. Ten 
thousand are at A.E.F. University at Beaune, 
some 7,000 are attending French universities. 
3,000 attending British. There are roughly 

31 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

130,000 men at Post Schools, which correspond 
to our elementary schools in United States. 
55,000 are attending the Divisional Educational 
Schools, which correspond to our High schools. 
In addition there are approximately 58,000 men 
in specialized vocational schools where they 
have full shop facilities of A.E.F. 

''Athletic activities: Athletic activities in- 
creasing daily in scope and popularity. Figures 
for February show 6,500,000 individual par- 
ticipants in games. In addition to mass ath- 
letics, unit championships are being played in 
football, basketball, soccer, boxing, tennis, swim- 
ming, tug of war, golf, track and field. 

''Entertainment activities: Reports of enter- 
tainment officers show monthly attendance for 
A.E.F. of between eight and ten million. Mov- 
ing pictures, professional talent from United 
States and particularly soldier shows being 
utilized in all parts of army and have done much 
to take care of leisure hours of troops. Horse 
shows have been held in nearly every division 
of A.E.F. and have proved very popular. 
Amount of all this work now being carried on 
is little short of stupendous." 

The following paragraphs from a personal 
letter are particularly significant as coming from 

32 



THE AMERICAN SOLDIER 

an officer of the regular army, who when he 
was in command of one of the cantonments 
in the United States was genuinely alarmed 
lest the War Department had not lost its sense 
of proportion, and was creating parlor ornaments 
instead of fighting men : 

^^I served in the Army of Occupation in the 
Philippines and in China after the Boxer cam- 
paign, and I want to tell you that the disci- 
pline and esprit de corps of these troops in 
Germany is incomparably better than any- 
thing I saw there. 

'^I think nothing has so contributed to this 
result as the welfare work and the educational 
work undertaken. We have every reason to 
be proud of the fact that we had people in com- 
mand of the army who had the vision to see 
what result this work would bring. 

^'I took command of the — th Division in 
the Army of Occupation in December, and up 
until the present time I never worked with a 
happier or more contented lot of men. Of 
course they all want to go home, and we wouldn't 
have much use for them if they didn't, but an 
intensified military course of training in the 
morning, schools and athletics in the afternoon, 
and study and entertainment in the evening 

33 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

have made their days so full that they have 
been perfectly contented to stay until their 
boat comes in June. 

^^This has been the experience of all the 
divisions up here in Germany, and their en- 
thusiasm, I fear, when they get home, may be 
taken for pro-Germanism." 

The War Department has learned so much 
in this great laboratory experiment in human 
conduct that the impious wish sometimes arises 
in one's mind that we might promptly try it 
all over again for the chance of profiting by our 
mistakes. Thank God we can't do that, but 
in our daily contact with these same men 
restored to their communities we can to a certain 
degree carry on the work, and in so doing we 
can learn much from the successes and failures 
of the Army. 

In planning for the immediate future, there 
are some things which we mustn't forget. In 
the first place, we mustn't expect these young 
men (or any humans for that matter) to be 
capable of remaining at concert pitch indefinitely. 

For a while, in dealing with the soldier who 
has returned from overseas, real ingenuity will 
be required to make much impression upon his 

34 



THE AMERICAN SOLDIER 

mind. Not only will ordinary life seem tame 
but, frankly, he is likely to have been over- 
handled and overwelfared. If, however, we 
have erred in this regard, it has been on the 
right side. 

May I venture still another suggestion, and 
that is to be careful and considerate of the 
soldier who, despite his earnest desire, failed 
to get across, and for the matter of that, of the 
young man who didn't get into the Army at 
all. The morale of these two groups will need 
our particular care. 

In closing, however, we should not end upon 
a note of warning, but rather upon one of 
exultation; for the war has taught us, if it has 
taught nothing else, that, given a great cause 
and a cross-section of our heterogeneous Ameri- 
can population, the resulting revelation of the 
power of human endurance, human courage and 
human accomplishment comes pretty near to 
proving objectively the divinity of man. 



35 



THE WAR AS A PRACTICAL TEST OF 
AMERICAN SCHOLARSHIP 1 

It is a difficult task to attempt to define the 
American scholar of to-day. If any of you 
doubt it, let him try it as I have tried. Scholar- 
ship, like many another broad term, has no 
sharply marked edges. It is hard to define 
anything that lacks definiteness ; and, after all, 
the task is relatively profitless, because we all 
of us recognize what is at the center of the 
concept. I think we all recognize that the 
scholar is an expert in some particular field or 
fields; but he is more than the expert as such, 
in that he knows enough of other matters to 
see his particular specialty in its relation to 
things in general. He must, to this degree at 
least, be a philosopher. This very general con- 
ception of scholarship is fairly constant, but the 
fields which the conception includes are broad- 
ening day by day and almost hour by hour. 

1 An address delivered before the New York Delta of Phi Beta 
Kappa at Columbia University upon the fiftieth anniversary of 
the estabUshment of the Chapter, June 3, 1919. 

36 



A PRACTICAL TEST OF SCHOLARSHIP 

We cannot to-day limit scholarship to the polite 
branches which were all that it embodied when 
this Society was founded or even when this 
Chapter was established. The scholar of the 
old-fashioned type must now accept as his 
fellow the man who has helped to flatten the 
trajectory of the 16-inch shell, or to control 
the birth rate of the cootie. Later on I shall 
suggest one other element which, in the light 
of the test which American scholarship has 
undergone in the past two years, it seems to 
me should now be included in our idea of the 
typical American scholar. 

We Americans are proud of being called a 
nation of inventors; and most of us have made, 
or almost made, private discoveries of an in- 
ventional nature which, for some reason, have 
never come to fruition. The scientific boards 
in Washington during the war received more 
than sixty thousand suggestions in some mechan- 
ical field; and I am told by those who ought to 
know that of all these not more than five of 
those coming from untrained minds were of 
any practical value. Even from the trained 
minds there came, I am told, no fundamental 
discovery in science as a direct result of the 
war conditions. Suggestions of improvements in 

37 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

detail and valuable suggestions there were in 
plenty, new applications of known principles, 
but application of a fundamentally new idea, 
no. That is only to say what we already know, 
that discovery is not made to order. In each 
case the idea had already been born in the mind 
of some intellectual pioneer and worked out 
by him, and some man who had the idea in 
the front of his mind was at hand to apply it 
to the new condition. And that means, I 
think, that if we met the test, we met it with 
our scholars. 

When the test came, certain fields of scholar- 
ship naturally afforded a better chance for im- 
mediate service than others. The chemist, for 
example, had a better chance a thousand-fold 
than the archaeologist. It is extraordinary, how- 
ever, how many of the gifts which burned bright 
on the national altar came from men with some 
out-of-the-way specialty. Take archaeology it- 
self, if you will. The best trench helmet de- 
veloped during the war was designed by the 
expert in armor from our own academic fellow- 
ship. I am told that a very important element 
in the length of time which it took to control 
the submarine menace was the fact that when 
war broke out the science of oceanography was 

38 



A PRACTICAL TEST OF SCHOLARSHIP 

almost wholly in the hands of the Germans. 
When the world's supply of cocoanut husks 
was taken up for gas masks and we still needed 
charcoal, we had to turn for additional sources 
to the tropical botanist, who might have been 
expected to remain reasonably undisturbed. 
It remained for a scholar in perhaps the purest 
branch of pure science, astronomy, to recognize 
the well known fact that it is the shape of the 
tail of any and every moving object, motor 
car or boat or what you will, and not the shape 
of the head, which is the factor of chief impor- 
tance in design, and to apply this recognition to 
artillery problems. The re-designing of our 
artillery shells under the direction of this as- 
tronomer added miles to their range. Another 
astronomer applied his experience in studying 
the movement of comets to solving certain 
problems of long-range artillery fire where the 
projectile in its flight rises into the circum- 
ambient ether. 

In proving the case for the American scholar, 
as I think we can prove it, we should not be 
beguiled into the pleasant task of recording 
the deeds of scholars and gentlemen when the 
deeds were those of the gallant gentleman 
rather than of the scholar per se. We have 

39 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

one here in our own academic family whose 
lieutenant's bars I should be as proud to wear 
as the stars of any of our generals. Nor need 
we, I think, cite the instances where the rigorous 
training of the scholar clearly laid the founda- 
tion for great accomplishment in some general 
field of administration. The man whom we 
can thank perhaps more than any other for the 
brilliant conduct of our war finance was seven- 
teen years ago editor-in-chief of the Columbia 
Law Review. We may well turn with pride, 
but we don't need him to prove our point, to 
the scholar of this university, formerly president 
of this Chapter, who, from his own talents and 
experience and his alert sense of scholarship 
in others, has earned the place which he now 
holds as educational director of the largest uni- 
versity in the world, the A.E.F. University at 
Beaune. 

Our case rests, as I say, upon the direct ap- 
plications of scholarship, and not only upon 
their quality, but on their range. A single 
division of the National Research Council, in 
its report for 1918, showed work of national 
significance by the scholars in physics, mathe- 
matics, and allied fields toward the solution 

40 



A PRACTICAL TEST OF SCHOLARSHIP 

of no fewer than sixty-eight different problems, 
every one of which needed for its solution men 
with training and knowledge and vision. At 
the outset, who among us had the slightest con- 
ception of the complexity of the adaptations 
to warfare of what was known to modern 
scholarship? We knew that the war was mount- 
ing into the air, but who had any realization of 
the adjustments which this involved? Fifteen 
fundamental problems based on pure physics 
promptly arose with reference to instruments 
for airplane operation. For example, at night 
and in the clouds, the aviator must have before 
his eyes a dial which will indicate the slightest 
deviation from his course. Seven problems had 
to do with airplane photography. As the art 
of camouflage advanced, for instance, color filters 
had to be devised for its detection from above. 
Seven additional problems had to do with fac- 
tors of construction and maintenance, as fuel 
efficiency. Nine others affected ballooning ; and 
the balloon, as the war developed, came to be of 
greater and greater importance. Eleven studies 
were in signalling: one, for example, a device 
for secret daylight signalling, with a range of 
five miles or more. And please remember that 
all these were the task of one branch of one 

41 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

organization within the field of pure science. 
By common consent, the dullest branch of 
physics was held to be acoustics, but since 1914 
the whole question of sound-ranging has been 
in the hands of experts in acoustics. A device 
developed by American physicists gave our 
men nineteen seconds in which to take cover 
from cannon fired four miles away. The most 
brilliant work in this field was that of a former 
student of the Columbia School of Mines. 

If I were to pick out one field in which the 
scholarly attitude has been most brilliantly 
rewarded, it is that of medicine. If our army 
surgeons and sanitarians had been confined to 
the practical family doctors, who cannot be 
bothered with all this new-fangled stuff, our 
men would have died like flies from disease, as 
they did in the Spanish-American War. It was 
the laboratory man, the theorist, the high- 
brow if you like, who made our health record 
a matter of national pride and congratulation. 
It was the knowledge of a scholar, coupled with 
his instinctive understanding of the human heart 
— neither could have accomplished the purpose 
alone — which sent hundreds of shell-shocks, 
as they came to be called (people used to call 
the condition by an uglier, if not a shorter, 

42 



A PRACTICAL TEST OF SCHOLARSHIP 

term) back into the lines with self-respect and 
nerve renewed. 

To turn to another field, it was a real scholar, 
even if he were also a dean, who, in spite of 
the best efforts of his practical associates to 
deter him, brought order out of chaos in the 
most important of our war boards through the 
collection and skillful presentation of statistical 
data. 

In many cases it was the scholar whom we 
must thank for the pointing out of the obvious. 
The early drafts rejected thousands of excellent 
potential soldiers because our existing height 
regulations were drawn for men of the northern 
European races; and the minimum height limit 
was well within the normal variation of the 
men of southern European ancestry, which has 
been so large an element in our recent immi- 
gration. Similarly, men of science have pointed 
out that the length of the marching step de- 
pends not alone on the length of the legs, but 
even more on the width of the hips, a simple 
fact which is of real military significance. The 
scholars in the Forest Products laboratories 
knew how to make boxes that would not break 
and spill their contents on the wharves at 
Hoboken or St. Nazaire, and, equally impor- 

43 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

tant, they knew how to educate the quarter- 
masters to use them. 

The fact that in many fields we reached the 
hmits of available man-power meant a wonder- 
ful stimulation to the study of certain problems 
affecting human welfare. Take for example the 
physiological aspects of industrial fatigue. In 
this field an excellent theoretical start had been 
made before the war, but the appeal was limited 
to those interested in the individual worker. 
With the war, however, and the shortage of 
labor, came a new and, I fear, a more potent 
appeal — the interest in the product and its 
prompt production. The worker who collapsed 
could not be replaced. Long hours or unsanitary 
surroundings meant spoiled material and broken- 
down machinery and resultant delay. And 
when there was a scholar at hand to show why 
this was so, you may be sure he had his day 
in court. 

The work of the scholar has not wholly been 
in getting things done. Perhaps an equally 
important side was in keeping impossible or 
unprofitable things from being attempted. When 
time was of the very essence of the whole pro- 
gram, the man who could say '^No" and prove 
the validity of his objection, performed a posi- 

44 



A PRACTICAL TEST OF SCHOLARSHIP 

tive work of great value. One of our associates 
at Columbia had a leading share in devising 
tests for candidates for the flying school, which, 
by rejecting the unfit at the outset, saved many 
lives from the time of their adoption and many, 
many thousands of dollars; for the training of 
a flyer who cannot be used when the time comes 
is a very costly piece of national extravagance 
in both money and men. 

Our scholars did not confine their activities 
to the battle of Washington. Not only as 
engineers and doctors, but as geologists and 
geographers, as meteorologists and sanitarians, 
they went with the troops to the front, and 
their counsel as to actual military operations 
was welcomed and followed. One of them, a 
bachelor and doctor of this University, died 
in the service in France. The scholar, like 
the soldier, stood ready to step forward to fill 
the gap in the ranks as he saw it, regardless of 
whether something more dignified might be 
found for him to do. Our own Barnard, Pro- 
fessor of Education, took what he was pleased 
to call his vacation in applying his scholarship 
to organizing an educational program for the 
wounded men in our hospitals, as a therapeutic 
measure. Being a scholar and not merely an 

45 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

expert, he saw the broad human aspect of his 
specialty; that the first thing to do with the 
man who is bUnded, or otherwise maimed, is 
to make him reaUze that it is worth while to 
get well; that he can have a life which is worth 
living; that if his old job is no longer possible, 
there are others for which he can be trained. 
One of America's most distinguished philosophical 
chemists settled down to the humble but very- 
essential problem of making mixed flours rise and 
bake with a crust — and solved it. The war 
services of a past President of this Chapter, now, 
alas, no longer with us, and those of our present 
President have been as useful as they have been 
inconspicuous. 

The need for the scholar was not only quali- 
tative, but quantitative. But for the general 
distribution of chemical knowledge in France 
and England, and the presence of men capable of 
promptly applying that knowledge to combat 
the gas attacks launched by the Germans, the 
war would have been lost before we could pos- 
sibly have rendered the slightest assistance; 
and on our side of the Atlantic when the armis- 
tice was signed, there were two thousand trained 
chemists engaged in the problems of gas war- 
fare alone. Our country, in a word, needed not 

46 



A PRACTICAL TEST OF SCHOLARSHIP 

only to have some men with the requisite 
training, but men enough to meet simultaneously 
many needs in many fields, and these men were 
drawn in large measure from our academic 
faculties. While one must not press the identity 
between the scholar and the professor too hard 
— for a number of reasons — the fact remains 
that the teaching profession provided the main 
reservoir from which the country drew. One 
of my friends in the Chemical Warfare Service 
has summarized the relation between the aca- 
demic scholar and that branch of the army 
activity. Both chiefs of the Chemical Service 
Station were college professors, one of them a 
member of this Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. Of 
the fourteen heads of the Research Division, eight 
were college professors. It was the college pro- 
fessors who made fundamental improvements in 
gas masks on the one hand, and who devised new 
gases to test the German masks on the other. 

As a nation, we did not realize at the outset, 
as Germany did, the importance of the man 
who knows, and of knowing who he is and 
where he is; and here, perhaps, lay our most 
fundamental un preparedness. What this cost 
us may be judged from a single instance. A code 

47 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

message from Germany directing the dismantling 
of the German ships lying in our ports was 
intercepted. If we had known that there was 
a professor of English in the University of 
Chicago who, in the pursuit of his medieval re- 
searches, had developed the power of reading 
ciphers almost at sight, that cable from Germany 
could have been promptly deciphered, we could 
have forestalled the sabotage, and something 
like six months in the use of these ships for the 
transport of our troops and munitions could 
have been gained. 

The job of getting the man who knew into 
the right niche was not an easy one. The 
scholars could not all be spared; for, after all, 
education and research are essential industries, 
and, fortunately for our institutions of learning, 
for our reviews and scientific agencies, and 
fortunately for the country as a whole, all of 
our scholars did not rush immediately into 
government work. The less thrilling task of 
keeping the lamps burning in our lighthouses 
was never more important than during the 
stormy days which we have just gone through. 
Furthermore, the scholar is a modest person, 
though he has his human vanities, as we all 
know who have seen our colleagues in uniform; 

48 



A PRACTICAL TEST OF SCHOLARSHIP 

but usually some one had to know about him 
and invite him to his place, a very sharp con- 
trast to the business men and lawyers who came 
down to Washington by the trainload to im- 
press us with their capacity to do any job which 
involved a commission of properly high degree. 

In general, I should say that the individuals 
in the universities met the test better than the 
institutions themselves. The latter did not, it 
seems to me, as institutions, grasp the situation. 
Very few studied the question of the assignment 
of their specialists as a problem in conservation 
as well as in publicity; and as far as the use 
of their facilities in the training of soldiers and 
sailors is concerned, the War Department and 
the Navy Department had literally to teach 
them how to meet the war conditions. Such 
help as came from organized bodies of scholars 
came rather from the learned societies than 
from the academic groups. 

Then there was a further difficulty, partic- 
ularly among the younger men, though not 
wholly among them. The expert's job, and 
hence inclusively the scholar's job, is relatively 
safe so far as the immediate risk of death is 
concerned, though not the risk of shortening 
life through overwork. One Columbia man, 

49 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

well over the draft age, told me frankly that 
he would gladly give up an important public 
office he held for the privilege of fighting with 
his hands, but he could not be tempted by an 
opportunity to fight with his head. Through 
this same impulse many and many a man at- 
tempted to conceal his special knowledge in 
order that he might fight in the line. The 
Army Committee on Classification of Personnel, 
which was in itself a beautiful example of 
scholarship in practical application, was able, 
however, in most instances to pluck out the 
expert from the line and set him, whether he 
was willing or not, at the task for which he 
was particularly adapted and particularly needed. 

What, from the point of view of the non- 
scholar, can be said as to the general usefulness 
of the men and women (for the women did 
their share) who came forward or were brought 
forward to take this trial by fire on behalf of 
American scholarship? First of all, the scholar 
must be a real scholar; he must have the 
natural ability and the long and rigorous train- 
ing necessary for accurate observation, and 
observation of the kind which, if I may be for- 
given a most unscholarly metaphor, includes 

50 



A PRACTICAL TEST OF SCHOLARSHIP 

the ability to distinguish the blue chips from 
the white; his deductions must be relentless, 
and his inductions must be luminous. That is 
asking a good deal, and it would be enough 
if his dealings were to be with other scholars or 
with scholars in the making. The papers of 
a leisurely recluse can be dug out by others 
from the even more deliberately published pro- 
ceedings of learned societies, even as the author 
has dug out those of his predecessors, and 
ultimately the practical application of his dis- 
coveries will be made. In national emergency, 
however, this process will not suffice. The 
scholar must descend from his tower; he must, 
if he is to serve effectively, learn to think to 
order and to do it rapidly, to deal with all 
sorts and conditions of men; he must bear 
with their amazing ignorances and profit by 
their equally amazing knowledge of things of 
which he is ignorant. He must know the art 
of team play. The war has brought out a new 
type of scholarship, or at any rate has developed 
it to such an extent that its implications are 
new, and that is the unselfish cooperation of 
experts to meet a given and usually an imme- 
diately pressing need. The development of 
the Liberty motor furnishes a good example 

51 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

of the results of such cooperative effort. It 
seems to me that the most important single 
lesson which our scholars can learn from the 
experience of the two past years is the impor- 
tance of this team play in scholarship, and not 
only team play with other scholars, but team 
play with those who have the equally valuable 
and perhaps even rarer gift of getting things 
done, who perhaps deserve the title of scholars 
in the control of time and space. The scholars 
who made good were those who had had not 
only the training and temperament for research, 
but the training and temperament for working 
with other people. The scholarship of the man 
who from self-centerdness or from a mistaken 
absorption in his specialty lacked the art of 
dealing with his fellow men was likely to prove 
a sterile scholarship, and in most cases a useless 
scholarship in the day of national need. 

One of the most dramatic things about the 
war was the speeding up of supply and trans- 
port under the strong hand of the man who 
had brought the Panama Canal to completion. 
General Goethals was no administrative theorist. 
He was willing to try anything and anybody 
once, but he was prompt in rejecting what did 
not promptly accomplish his purpose. An en- 

52 



A PRACTICAL TEST OF SCHOLARSHIP 

gineer of General Goethals' distinction can be 
regarded as a scholar in his particular field; 
but the point I want to make is that during 
his service as Quartermaster-General, when of- 
ficers of the regular army and over-night 
majors, as they were called, presidents of manu- 
facturing plants, bankers and lawyers, were 
passing in what seemed to be an almost un- 
broken procession through his office, he retained 
just two men in his inner circle from first to 
last, and both were academic persons. Herbert 
Hoover surrounded himself with scholars, ento- 
mologists, statisticians and public health men. 
He did not always use them for their specialties, 
but he evidently liked the type. The great 
welfare societies did the same, and the list of 
academic men whom they used makes an im- 
pressive total. 

These instances are typical of a very general 
success among scholars in cooperating effectively 
and helpfully with eminently practical men. 
This may be because the scholar has been 
trained in a form of competition which the 
so-called practical man lacked. He is used to 
having his work wiped out by some discovery 
of a rival, and having to begin afresh. He is 
used to a checking of his work by his fellows 

53 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

which, if of a different nature, is no less relent- 
less than the war-time check in the toll of 
human lives. The man of high reputation in 
business often failed because he had learned to 
measure success and his own competence only 
in terms of dividends, and in the new test he 
found his measuring-rod worse than useless. 

Our scholars of the cooperative type not only 
pursued their researches, but they got their 
military associates into the habit of thinking 
in terms of scholarship. One of their most 
useful accomplishments, initiated by a Doctor 
of Philosophy of this University, was the or- 
ganization of Thursday evening conferences for 
the discussion of the new scientific and technical 
problems facing the Army and Navy. This 
furnished a nucleus for the exchange of ideas 
between the different research groups, both here 
and abroad; for scholarship was mobilized 
and utilized in France, England, and Italy, as 
well as here, and our Allies laid their scientific 
discoveries before us with the greatest loyalty. 
At these conferences their reports were dis- 
cussed and digested and applied, instead of being 
pigeon-holed at the War College, as I fear 
might have been otherwise the case. It was as 
a result of one of these conferences that a 

54 



A PRACTICAL TEST OF SCHOLARSHIP 

member of this Chapter, acting on a hint which 
came from a French report, was largely instru- 
mental in developing a method of submarine 
detection through sound-waves of a particular 
type, which, though it came too late to be of 
service in the war, may serve in peace to relieve 
the greatest terror of the mariner, the danger 
of collision in darkness or fog with sister vessel 
or iceberg or derelict. A potent factor in 
breaking down the barriers and delays of de- 
partmental jealousies and bureaucratic tradition 
all along the line was the free-masonry of the 
company of scholars in Washington. 

It must not be forgotten that our scholar in 
war worked under two powerful stimuli, neither 
of them operative under ordinary conditions. 
Although he was out of his accustomed setting, 
working with strange people and at strange 
tasks, nevertheless the realization of the na- 
tional need and the joy of feeling an identifica- 
tion with the forces facing the adversary tended 
to produce that fine frenzy which enables a 
man to do better than he knows how. Then, 
for the first time in history, the scholar had 
unlimited funds. It is an interesting subject for 
speculation as to how he can ever go back to 
the limits of academic appropriations. It is to 

55 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

be feared that in many cases he will not, but 
will turn to industrial enterprises instead. If, 
however, there was an unlimited supply of 
funds, there was a corresponding deficiency in 
time, and the scholar who could not speed up 
to meet the new conditions had little chance 
to make his mark. The men who failed in war 
because they could not grasp the significance 
of the time factor may, however, still be emi- 
nently useful in peace. On the other hand, 
the training which some of our scholars received 
in meeting another war-time condition is likely 
to have an important influence upon the relation 
of scholarship to industry. Many a scholar 
found for the first time that to meet a given 
condition a beautiful laboratory solution may 
be no solution at all, that the answer, to be 
effective, must meet the peculiar condition of 
quantity production. 

The merit of the Liberty engine, of which I 
have already spoken, lies not alone in the ex- 
cellence of its design, admirable as that is, but 
in the fact that it is so constructed that we 
could produce fifteen hundred of them in a 
single week. Or, to take another example, in 
1914 we made all together eighteen hundred field 
glasses in this country. Last winter, thanks to 

56 



A PRACTICAL TEST OF SCHOLARSHIP 

the cooperation of the scholars in the chemistry 
of glass and in the field of optics on the one 
hand, and of the experts in quantity pro- 
duction on the other, we were making thirty- 
five hundred pairs of field glasses each week. 
There are many other adaptations of scholar- 
ship to industry that are awaiting similar 
practical solutions. One of oiu* most dis- 
tinguished scholars in physics has said publicly 
that the day is past when one can defend any 
distinction between pure and applied science. 
One might as well try to distinguish between 
pure and applied virtue. 

I said at the outset that I would venture later 
on an enlargement of the conception of the Amer- 
ican scholar, in the light of what the past two 
years have made so clear. The scholar himself 
as well as those of us who are not scholars, 
needs, I think, to get a somewhat broader con- 
ception of the term; to develop it from its 
present popular connotation so that the at- 
tributes which come to one's mind will no 
longer be the static and selfish, but rather the 
dynamic and social. Emerson, in his essay on 
the American Scholar, seems to have some 
prophetic glimpse of this broader conception. 
He says, for example, that '^action is with the 

57 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

scholar subordinate, but it is essential; that 
without it, he is not yet man; that the true 
scholar grudges every opportunity of action 
passed by, as a loss of power"; and elsewhere, 
''that a great soul will be strong to live, as 
well as strong to think." The old idea of the 
scholar was the recluse, the individual; the 
new, it seems to me, should be oDe of a 
company of builders, each bringing to the 
common task, for the general welfare, his train- 
ing and craft, his knowledge and ideas, to 
combine them with the gifts which his fellows 
are bringing. 

Thus far almost all my modern instances 
have been taken from the realms of natural 
science. I need not remind you, however, that 
although science has tremendously broadened 
the range of scholarship, nevertheless the schol- 
arship which is a practical asset is not and 
never will be limited to natural science. The 
record of the past two years has many an ex- 
ample of the essentially important work of 
scholars in other fields. The records are not so 
clear-cut, the results are perhaps more often 
negative; but the work was done and it counted. 
In the field of public information our American 

58 



A PRACTICAL TEST OF SCHOLARSHIP 

scholars in the pohtical sciences did excellent 
work under the direction of a Doctor of Phi- 
losophy of this University, and their record for 
fairness and sanity makes an enviable contrast 
with the pathetic propaganda of the German 
intellectuals. Similarly, the work of our Co- 
lumbia scholars of the Legislative Drafting 
Bureau proved of great value in formulating 
and, perhaps more important, in discouraging 
legislation . 

In general, however, I think we ought to face 
the fact squarely that our scholarship in man's 
relations with his fellow men, in his understand- 
ing of himself and his fellows as contrasted 
with his mastery of physical things, cannot 
claim so clear-cut a decision. Even in science 
we should not set too great store by ourselves. 
Professor, late Colonel, Millikan writes: '^The 
contribution of the United States in research 
and development lines was less, far less in pro- 
portion to our resources and population, than 
that of England or France, and this in spite 
of the far heavier strain under which they were 
laboring.". And yet, with us, science was better 
mobilized, better equipped, and can make a 
better showing than the humanities. Part of 
this can be readily explained by the statement 

59 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

that preparation for war is after all engineering 
on a huge scale. But we must not prove too 
much if we are to profit by the lesson. For 
example, the war found us utterly unprepared 
in foreign-language knowledge; and we are still 
unprepared. How many real Americans, I don't 
mean recent immigrants, but men and women 
with our traditions and our point of view, can 
speak Russian? How many can speak the 
languages of the Near East or Far East? 

Excellent work has been done by individual 
philosophers, economists, and sociologists in 
labor questions, in welfare work, on the war- 
time trade and industrial boards; but as a 
whole our scholars in these fields did not dom- 
inate the situation as did the men of science 
in theirs. Of course, their task was infinitely 
harder. For one thing, though we may be ready 
to confess our ignorance of calculus or colloidal 
chemistry or thermo-dynamics, we all believe 
in the validity of our off-hand judgments in 
politics and morals, and indeed in all the springs 
of human conduct. Yet when all allowances 
are made, the fact remains that there is a 
scholarship in these matters and we have Amer- 
ican scholars in them, but that with distinguished 
exceptions these professionals permitted the 

60 



A PRACTICAL TEST OF SCHOLARSHIP 

man in the street or the man in the editor's 
chair, or in Congress, or in the Cabinet, to 
proclaim his amateur pronouncement and to get 
away with it. Indeed, I will go further and 
say that not a few who know or ought to know 
that it is not necessary to be intolerant in order 
to be patriotic seemed to set their knowledge 
upon this point at one side. In war time it is 
a matter for the scholar's judgment and con- 
science to decide whether it is wise to attempt a 
leadership which at the moment will be misun- 
derstood and probably ineffective, possibly even 
dangerous, because of the reaction, to the cause 
he has at heart; or to bide his time in silence, 
awaiting a more suitable time to be heard. 
But I submit that he is sinning against the 
light when he joins in the hue and cry of the 
untrained and the half- trained. The war has 
given the natural scientist his chance, and he 
has profited thereby. In the years to come 
the test will, I think, shift to the scholars in 
the human sciences. The crises of the future 
will have to do with problems of human con- 
duct rather than of the control of physical 
things; and, as these crises come, our scholars 
in human relations should be more ready for 
the call to mobilize. 

61 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

In practically every case the instances that 
I have given of the successful tests of our 
scholarship involve the work of a member of 
Phi Beta Kappa or of the sister society, Sigma 
Xi; and I therefore may be permitted to say a 
word more directly to our younger members 
of the society of those seeking the philosophy 
of life, to our Columbia scholars in the making. 
In my time, which, by the way, was just twenty- 
one years ago, a man who wanted to live the 
life of a scholar was practically limited to teach- 
ing as the means of making his living. The 
result in the way of incompetent and half- 
hearted teaching we all know. Let me say 
to you of to-day that unless you want to teach, 
there is no reason under heaven why you should 
do so. There are plenty of other means of 
earning an honest living. The scholar is not 
nowadays limited to the academic halls. We 
have scholars of the first quality not only in 
special research institutions, but in government 
bureaus and in industrial organizations. The 
men in government service who could be spared 
from their other responsibilities for war work 
made an excellent war record. On the other 
hand, we want to remember that the real 
teacher, whether in the faculty or out of it, 

62 



A PRACTICAL TEST OF SCHOLARSHIP 

has a tremendous advantage in the art of pres- 
entation. During the war the effectiveness of 
our scholar teachers was well tested by an 
entirely new set of pupils, pupils sometimes 
with eagles or stars on their shoulders, or in 
the civil field, captains of industry, clad in the 
glittering armor of a big business reputation. 

Nowadays one cannot be a scholar in general. 
One has to have some specialty. As to what 
that specialty shall be in terms of usefulness to 
the community, I think I have given you ex- 
amples enough to show that the ran-ge is almost 
unlimited. I had planned to sum up this by 
a brief record of the discovery and application 
to war purposes of helium; but I find that one 
of my own students in Columbia College, now 
a member of the Geological Survey, has beaten 
me out; and you can find the whole story in 
the May issue of the National Geographic Maga- 
zine. I cannot resist, however, a summary of 
the steps. First, the astronomer, just about 
the time this chapter was established, finds a 
new line in the solar spectrum. Thirty years 
later, the geologist comes upon an unusual 
stone and turns to a great chemist for its anal- 
ysis, with the consequent recognition of helium 
as a mundane element. About the same time 

63 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

comes its identification as one of the newly 
recognized ingredients of the air, and the study 
of its properties. Then a Kansas chemist dis- 
covers its presence in some natural gas about 
which he was consulted because it would not 
burn properly. Then comes the war with its 
incendiary bullet and the need of a non-in- 
flammable content for balloons and dirigibles. 
Then the cooperation of physicist, engineer, and 
geologist — Canadian and American — makes 
helium available for this purpose. Before these 
researches helium cost $1700 a cubic foot and 
was obtainable only in Germany. The present 
price is 10 cents a cubic foot, and it is falling. 
The importance of all this for peace is very 
great. In these days of airplane hops we are 
forgetting that a Zeppelin made the trip from 
Bulgaria to what should have been German 
East Africa with medicines and ammunition. 
The Germans having disappeared in the mean- 
time, the Zeppelin turned around and came 
back, making a continuous voyage of several 
thousand miles. 

But do not forget that not all scholars made 
good in the great test. Let me sum up what I 
have already said. In the first place, to be 
useful the scholarship must be sound. The 

64 



A PRACTICAL TEST OF SCHOLARSHIP 

near-scholar, the man who took the short-cut 
in preparation, proved to be a positive danger. 
The mere expert in some narrow field, the man 
who did not realize the implications of what 
he knew, was relatively useless. A man to 
succeed had to be intense without being narrow. 
Even among the sound scholars, the men who 
really knew, the isolated and insulated individual 
could very rarely make much headway. It 
was the open-minded scholar, the maker and 
keeper of friends, who got his chance, the 
scholar whose learning was to him a living thing, 
not necessarily to be displayed in the market 
place, and never for the sake of the display, 
but on the other hand never wrapped in a 
napkin and buried in the earth. 

Will the scholar, now that his practical worth 
has been tested and proved, be content to slip 
back into relative obscurity; or will he, on the 
other hand, be tempted too far into the lime- 
light and thereby lose those very qualities 
which gave him his value? Will he be satisfied 
with positions of leadership rather than leadership 
itself, which may be a very different thing? It is 
largely for you young men and young women of 
the rising generation of scholars to say. 



65 



WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED ?i 

I AM going to try to select three or four 
general fields in which we Americans have had 
a chance to learn lessons of permanent value 
as the result of our war experience. Then I 
shall try to apply these to what seems to me 
the most typical specimen of the best in Ameri- 
can life, a great American University; and 
finally, I shall try to apply them to the situa- 
tion which faces you young men and women 
of the graduating class as you step out to take 
your places in the world. And in so doing 
I'm going to look deliberately on the bright 
side. There are troubles enough in the world 
to worry and depress us, and we have to face 
them, but let us face them with a confidence 
that is justified in the light of the examples 
of man's endurance, of his courage, of his pos- 
sibilities of accomplishment, which it has been 
our privilege to witness within the lifetime of 
this academic generation. 

^ Commencement address delivered at the University of Mich- 
igan, June 26, 1919. 

66 



WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED? 

What have we learned? In the first place, 
we have learned that as a nation we possess 
the power to see a big job through, and we 
possess it because we have the qualities of 
youth — enthusiasm, learning capacity, energy, 
elasticity, initiative — the pioneering spirit. We 
have the shortcomings of youth also — im- 
patience, superficiality, improvidence, cock-sure- 
ness — but when the test came we managed to 
strengthen our virtues and to a large extent to 
overcome our failings. 

The various stocks that have emigrated to our 
shores have come as successive waves of pioneers, 
of men to whom new and unfamiliar conditions 
serve as an incentive rather than a discourage- 
ment, and it is the persistence of this pioneer- 
ing spirit, essentially a youthful spirit, which 
has had much to do with our success. 

What single group made the finest impression 
in the great war? I think we will agree that 
it was the American doughboy. As one saw 
him in France he was absolutely youth incar- 
nate, and he is a cross section of our complex 
population. If anyone still doubts that all of 
these stocks, the Teutonic included, have been 
willing to do their share even at the risk or 
cost of life, let him read any of the lists of 

67 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

battle casualties or the list of honors for heroic 
conduct and he will have the best kind of 
proof. Let us remember in this connection 
that nearly one-fourth of our drafted men 
couldn't speak and write English adequately 
when they entered the Army. In spite of a 
number of unsightly pieces of slag, which are 
either floating on the surface or have sunk to 
the bottom, the great national melting pot has 
evidently done its work well. 

Our heterogeneous immigration, our enormous 
national resources, which have tempted us to 
live on capital rather than on interest, our 
prosperity, have made us neither fat nor flabby. 
We now know that as a people we don't really 
care about money or the money game if we 
are shown some other game better worth play- 
ing; that selfishness and luxury drop away as if 
by magic when they interfere with the keener 
satisfactions of giving one's self. Even for us 
stay-at-homes, the Liberty Loan people, Mr. 
Hoover, the Red Cross and other welfare work- 
ers were on hand to show us how to play the 
better game. I don't need to remind you of 
the details, nor that in spite of human grumbling 
and talk of sacrifice, in the bottom of our hearts 
we all enjoyed the process. 

68 



WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED? 

In the second place, we have learned that to 
see the job through we need all of the nation, 
men and women, not merely the profession of 
arms and the mysterious powers of finance — 
we need all of everyone. We need them not 
as individuals but as a team, and we have 
learned that we can develop team play. 

Our easiest jobs were the raising of our men 
and our money; our hardest, the moulding of 
the whole into an organic unity. Just as our 
young men by the millions took their place in 
the line when the bugle blew, older men by the 
tens of thousands left their private affairs to 
get along as best they might, and regardless of 
political affiliations or personal convenience, 
found place for themselves in the administrative 
army. And they were ably seconded by the 
women. Hundreds of men in key positions 
have gladly borne witness to the share which 
their secretaries and their other women asso- 
ciates played in bringing about the needed 
results. 

The first days of the war were days of whirl- 
ing confusion, colored by glowing forecasts. 
Then followed months of experimentation, by 
trial and error, of hope deferred by long delays, 
of well meant but none the less embarrassing 

69 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

internal rivalries, of sudden spurts. Later came 
the days of last autumn, when the whole great 
machine was throbbing rhythmically and stead- 
ily, with only a minor ''knock" here and there — 
a sure indication to the watchful enemy, who 
had had more than a taste of what the machine 
could produce, that the game was up; and 
finally the eleventh of November and the order 
to reverse the engines. 

It ought to be evident from our experience 
that for any great enterprise we need all the 
young men and the young women, and all the 
older ones who are still young in heart. We 
need to know who they are, where they are, 
what they can do, and we need to touch them 
at every point; for not only do we need them 
all, but we need all of each one of them. We 
should never again face a great national crisis 
with nearly one-third of our men of military 
age unfit for hard physical work. We need 
campaigns of physical education and social 
hygiene, and we need to apply the lessons in 
human salvage which the army has learned 
during the war. But we need more than each 
individual and all of him. We must see to it 
that the individual star, of whatever magnitude, 
is subordinated to the team play of the group. 

70 



WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED? 

And team play means more than energy and 
^^pep." It means a marshalling of the old 
fashioned and homely virtues of courtesy^ defer- 
ence and consideration. 

In the third place, we have learned that to 
accomplish a great result we need the leader- 
ship of those who know and who know vividly 
and constructively. Our experience has been 
that in certain fields, finance, science, manu- 
facturing in quantity production, medicine, we 
had a supply of those who knew. In other 
fields, in intimate knowledge of foreign condi- 
tions and foreign languages for example, we 
had not. 

At first we didn't know where our leaders 
were, and in many cases we began by following 
false prophets. The value of one man with 
training, brains and persistence can be shown 
by a single example: There was a man who 
answered these qualifications connected with the 
Council of National Defence, not in a very 
exalted position. He was the first in all this 
country to see that the army program and the 
shipping program did not fit. It took him a 
long time to convince the two groups of over- 
worked, harried officials that neither could play 

71 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

the game alone; that the closest cooperation 
was necessary. He had no access to the records, 
but he finally managed to build up a convincing 
statement out of the shreds of information 
which he gathered here and there, and at last 
he succeeded in getting everyone concerned 
into the attitude of wanting to face the facts. 
Everyone would have had to face them sooner or 
later, but without the devotion and leadership of 
this one man, it would have been only as the 
result of a very serious dislocation of function. 

One field in which the right leadership has 
been most brilliantly rewarded is that of medi- 
cine. Just consider what we have done in this 
field: The success of the anti-typhoid injections; 
the reduction in dysenteric diseases due to 
chlorination of drinking water; the encouraging 
fight against cerebro-spinal meningitis and pneu- 
monia; the identification of trench fever, and 
the practical freedom from typhus. As to 
wounds, a tetanus antitoxin which has made 
lock-jaw almost a negligible disease; a serum 
against gas gangrene; the Carrel-Dakin method 
of chemical sterilization of wounds; the splint- 
ing of fractures on the battle field and over- 
head extension apparatus in the hospital. To 
quote Simon Flexner, '^The entire psychology 

72 



WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED? 

of the wounded men was altered, the wards 
made cheerful and happy, pain abolished, in- 
fection controlled, and recovery hastened by 
means of the new or improved surgical and 
mechanical measures put into common use." 

The fourth lesson of which I wish to speak is 
that a high aim and ideal is what counts most 
of all, what lifts the individual up from selfish- 
ness and sloth. To bind the country together 
and to make the transformation which still 
seems miraculous, we had a noble national aim, 
a complete dedication to the task before us, an 
utter absence of any selfish or self-seeking factor 
in the whole enterprise. The conduct of our 
soldiers, their submission to a discipline to which 
most of them were completely unused was, I 
think, in a very large measure due to the recog- 
nition of this aim. We recognized it as a nation 
and we recognized it in one another. The 
standard of contact set by our soldiers during 
the days of conflict is unique in military history. 
WTiole divisions went for months without a 
single court-martial. The reason was, more 
than anything else, the national assumption that 
they would give a good account of themselves 
and the fact that they felt themselves in train- 

73 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

ing for the championship, and no man wanted 
to miss his chance on the battlefield for the sake 
of a selfish indulgence. 

Some of the experiments in conduct tried in 
the American Expeditionary Forces were ex- 
traordinary in their success. The leave areas, an 
immense enterprise, were run on the basis of 
absolute freedom to the enlisted man. He lived 
in the best hotels in Europe and amused him- 
self in casinos where crowned heads had been 
in the habit of gambling away the money of 
their subjects. He had no roll calls, no taps, 
no officers in sight, no military machinery what- 
ever. He arose when he pleased, either before 
or after his breakfast; he ate and drank when 
he pleased, and he stayed out as late as he 
pleased. The physical and moral effect of this 
absolute change from the military regime was 
a very interesting and instructive phenomenon, 
but that is not the point I wish to make. Out 
of the thousands and thousands of men who 
were sent to these leave areas, there was hardly 
a single case in which a man abused the trust 
which was put upon him or failed to turn up 
on time to go back to the grind of military duty. 
This could never have been done with soldiers 
of another type, with soldiers lacking an ideal. 

74 



WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED? 

Someone has recently written that fine minds 
have been finely touched by the war, and base 
minds basely. He might have added that wise 
minds have been wisely touched, and foolish 
minds foolishly. In general, I think it may 
fairly be said that when the appeal was to the 
finest in a man's character, the result was cor- 
respondingly fine. 

These, it seems to me, are the four main 
things we have learned, or at any rate we have 
had a chance to learn. First, that we are a 
real nation, potentially strong with the strength 
of youth. Second, that to fulfill our mission, 
every man and woman and all of every such 
individual is an object of national concern; 
that we must be mobilized and we must con- 
tinue our lessons in team play. We have still 
plenty to learn in this field. Third, that we 
must have and must recognize the leadership 
of those who know, which, after all, is the 
great test of a democracy. Fourth, that to 
bring out the best that is in us, as individuals 
and as a nation, we must have an aim, high, 
clear-cut and clearly understood. If, now, I 
attempt to apply these four lessons which we 
have had a chance to learn, to educational con- 

75 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

ditions, and particularly to university condi- 
tions, it will be for three reasons: The first is 
the general wisdom of confining one's remarks 
to things he knows something about. The 
second, that there is no single institution more 
characteristic of the best in our American life 
than a great American University. And there is 
this third reason, that if we had not had a supply 
of young men with the stamp of the American 
college upon them, we could never have met the 
call for officers, for nearly a quarter of a million 
of them. I am told that the Germans were 
prepared to admit and to discount our wealth in 
money, in materials and in man power, but they 
looked forward confidently to a complete failure 
on our part in training officers to lead our men 
in battle. Of course, all the citizen officers 
who made good records were not college men, 
but the college trained citizens were the men 
who set the pace and made the standard. 

It was Pitt who said, '^The atrocious crime 
of being a young man I shall attempt neither 
to palliate nor to deny." Nor should a uni- 
versity seek to palliate or to deny the charge 
of being a place of resort for youth. A uni- 
versity, it seems to me, should be a place where 
the primary object is not the repression of 

76 



WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED? 

youthful exuberance nor the correction of youth- 
ful failings (though both may be necessary on 
occasion), but rather, a place for the encourage- 
ment of the great and vital qualities of youth — 
enthusiasm, energy, power of acquisition, sen- 
sitiveness of impression. It is the place where 
the older members of the community have the 
best chance to stay young. The university 
should be essentially a company of enthusiasts, 
of pioneers. There is a frontier for every worker 
to clear — no matter how narrow or how wide 
his horizon may be. In a university there is 
no proper place, among faculty or students, for 
the disillusioned, the cynical, the defeatist. 

Now we come to the application of the second 
lesson, the lesson of mobilization, of team play. 
In the first place, no university is alive where 
mobilization is limited to the Recorder's office. 
In a live institution, regent, professor, student, 
janitor, each is a part of the game and must 
feel that he is. He must feel that in its ad- 
ministration the institution has learned the 
great lesson of direct and human personal con- 
tact. Science, among all its triumphs, cannot 
include any device for conveying a message 
from mind to mind or from heart to heart half 

77 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

so good as the human voice and the human eye. 
Within the faculty, this element of human co- 
operation should be reflected by the vitality of 
the organism rather than by the complexity of 
the organization, which may not be vital at all. 
Each member must feel that the general repute 
is safeguarded by honest and intelligent stand- 
ards, honestly and intelligently administered. 
The university, like the country at large, must 
make itself responsible for all of each and every 
student, his bodily condition, for example, just 
as directly as his mental. 

It will be recalled that one of my justifications 
for applying war experiences to university con- 
ditions was the share which the college and 
university men had in building up our supply of 
ofiicers. If we study why the college men made 
good officers, and make allowance for the fact 
that it is the kind of man who goes to college 
who is likely to make a good officer anyway, 
and all the other allowances we can think of, 
we can't dodge the conclusion that there is some- 
thing outside of the college curriculum which 
has been an important factor in bringing about 
the results. On the other hand, important as 
the other factors are, the curriculum has had 
its share, and it is in my judgment a leading and 

78 



WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED? 

not always an adequately recognized share. 
The comfortable theory that once he has settled 
down to something important the college ne'er- 
do-well will suddenly blossom forth into a com- 
petent leader of men didn't work out in practice. 
It may have happened here and there, but it 
didn't happen as a general rule. In the fight- 
ing line, it was very generally the man with a 
sound academic record, not necessarily the Phi 
Beta Kappa lad, but the good scholar and 
active college citizen, the man who had taken 
the trouble to learn things and learn people, 
who made the best record. I naturally watched 
with particular interest the records of my own 
old students at Columbia, and I know that this 
is so. 

It is a significant fact, however, for those of 
us who are interested in the welfare of college 
boys and girls, that the United States govern- 
ment deliberately built up what was to all 
intents and purposes an undergraduate college 
life for the young men of the army, with ath- 
letics, dances, dramatics, singing, and all the 
rest, even including opportunities for reading 
and study. Even the most hardened of regular 
officers, who at the first, I fear, regarded this as 

79 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

some of the civilian foolishness with which all 
soldiers have to contend, came to see that the 
program was a vital factor in building up such 
a body of fighting men as they had never seen. 
And this is only another way of saying that if 
you want to use the human machine for any 
purpose, you must concern yourself with the 
whole of it. Human nature does not come in 
air-tight compartments. 

President Wilson coined a phrase which has 
thoroughly gone the rounds when he said that 
the side-shows of college life should not over- 
shadow nor distract from the entertainment in 
the main tent. We all agree to this. But I 
think we are more inclined than when the 
words were spoken to urge that the side-shows, 
properly and intelligently subordinated, should 
be under the same management as the main 
tent. The army has tried the experiment on 
a large scale and it has worked well. In Feb- 
ruary last there were in France and on the 
Rhine six million and a half individual par- 
ticipants in athletic games, ten million attend- 
ants on entertainments, nearly a quarter of a 
million students. 

None of the lessons which the Army has 
80 



WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED? 

learned are more significant than those which 
have to do with mobihzation and classification. 
The activities of the Provost Marshal General, 
of the Committee on Classification and Person- 
nel, in cooperation with the Committee on 
Education, furnish the best record of large scale 
human engineering in the new science of per- 
sonnel of which we have any record, either in 
this country or, I think, elsewhere. 

A university like this one is an army, and 
not such a small army either, judging by peace- 
time standards. The United States found that 
it was worth while, indeed that it was abso- 
lutely necessary in organizing its forces, to 
find out everything it could about every man 
in the army, what he needed physically to in- 
crease his efficiency; what he needed to keep 
him interested and out of mischief; what he 
should have in the way of training — based on 
what he knew already and based on careful 
mental tests — to make him of the greatest 
usefulness; whether he had the will to win, 
and if not, whether anything could be done 
to get it into him. 

In a word, the United States wanted to know 
just what each man's possibilities were. Was 
he officer material or non-com material? Should 

81 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

he go into the hne or one of the special corps — or 
to the labor battalion? As a result of this program, 
the Army succeeded in finding a place that counted 
for 98 per cent of the drafted men. 

Now I realize that a university can't do all 
these things with its army in just the way the 
government can. It can't casually transfer a 
man from engineering to psychology, nor a girl 
from philosophy to cookery — or vice versa — 
no matter how desirable such a transfer might 
be for the individual and the community. But 
it can do a great deal more than it now does in 
finding out about all its members, informing 
them of their strength and weaknesses, in seeing 
that every student gets a chance to enjoy in 
so far as possible the high privileges of youth, 
and to get a helping hand over the bumps in 
the road, which also come with youth. Every 
student ought to have the opportunity to round 
out his character and his capacities. It ought 
not to be left to chance that any student gets 
the best personal contacts for him or her with 
faculty and fellow-students, the best oppor- 
tunities for learning team play. Every student 
ought to leave with some definite aim in life, 
and if possible an aim high enough to be an ideal 
that is worth working for. 

82 



WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED? 

A university is not doing its full duty if its 
athletics and social life are limited to those who 
need these the least; if its alumni are regarded 
merely as fillers of the grandstands or recipients 
of oratory, and possible sources of pecuniary 
support. The alumni are the best possible 
sources of keeping the faculty informed as to 
what the world really wants in the way of 
trained men and women, and, for the students, 
of information, suggestions, and jobs, both 
temporary and permanent. 

I realize that many of these things are now 
done here and elsewhere, but in the light of 
what we have learned from the experience of 
the University of Uncle Sam, I am sure that our 
American universities and colleges have hardly 
scratched the surface of what they might do 
and what, I think, they will ultimately do in 
the realm of human engineering. Nearly all 
educational institutions merely follow what they 
find the leaders are doing, and in this field there 
is an opportunity, I am sure, for real leadership. 

We know now that men and women can be 
measured by impersonal tests and that it is 
practicable to put aside the material which it is 
either impossible to fashion in the academic 
mould, or for which, even if the job is possible, 

83 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

the expense in wear and tear is entirely beyond 
the value of the result to be obtained. To be 
specific, why shouldn't we have an intelligence 
test of candidates for the degree of Doctor of 
Philosophy, just as we had a physical and 
psychological examination for candidates for 
the flying schools? 

I don't mean that we should leap from one 
illogical position clear across the road into 
another. Mental measurements are not yet 
an exact science, and a man of moderate ability, 
with a will to succeed, may be a better aca- 
demic investment than his more brilliant brother 
who lacks that quality; but, by pruning very 
sparingly (one does not have to chop down a 
tree to prune it) the saving in time and energy 
will be enormous. 

Fundamentally the human relationships are 
what count, the qualities leading to team play 
and cooperation, and away from isolation and 
its ills. This means that if a faculty is to 
exercise its leadership, it must know the student 
body, it must maintain and develop points of 
human touch. Impersonal tests, impersonal rec- 
ords, all that modern practice and modern 
science can teach us we must have, but these 
must be used only as the framework for what is 

84 



WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED? 

after all the fundamental thing, direct human 
contact between teacher and teacher, teacher 
and student, and student and student. 

Now as to leadership, and in a university we 
can identify the leaders with the teachers, there 
is no doubt, I think, that the teachers^ pro- 
fession comes out of the war in a higher place 
than it went in, and the scholar goes back to 
his work with a feeling of confidence in himself 
in view of his record in competition and com- 
parison with men in other callings. I venture 
to predict that we shall hear a good deal less 
frequently in the future the old gibe that the 
man who could do things did them and the 
man who couldn't, taught them. The teachers 
made good, not only because of their scholar- 
ship, but because of their personality. I think 
this experience of the last two years is going to 
accelerate greatly the movement which had 
already started of turning to the academic 
world for the man who can do things and do 
them with other people. Entirely apart from 
the contrasts in income, the sheer fun of ex- 
ecutive work, with plenty of money to spend on 
what you want to get done, is a pretty strong 
temptation for a man with a heavy teaching 

85 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

schedule and an annual department appropria- 
tion of say $75. Both the regular army officers 
who have made conspicuously good, and the 
scholars of the cooperative type who have made 
conspicuously good, are being actively bidden 
for by bankers and manufacturers and all sorts 
of people. Neither profession can compete on 
the purely financial side with these tempters 
and, in order to hold their first-rate men, they 
will each have to make some greater contribution 
in the things that money alone can't buy. 

Both in the nation and in our republics of 
letters and science, we must learn to distinguish 
more clearly between the power that comes with 
knowledge, and the ability to talk about things. 
It was very interesting to watch in Washington 
the gradual substitution of the man with the 
latter quality by the man with the former in 
positions of responsibility, and I am going to 
confess that, in the early days, some of the 
conferences which it was my privilege or my 
duty to attend, reminded me for all the world 
of certain faculty meetings, in which gentlemen 
without definite knowledge of the matter in hand 
were discussing at considerable length what they 
were pleased to call principles, but which were 
really off-hand impressions. 

86 



WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED? 

I think that in their service to the university 
and to the nation, the scholars may well profit 
by the demonstration that it was not only the 
man who knew his subject, but the man who 
knew how to deal with his fellow men, who 
was likely to make his impression. Isn't there 
such a thing as academic provincialism, even 
within the walls of a man's own university, 
certainly as between institution and institution, 
which can be remedied by the encouragement 
of these social and cooperative sides of the 
scholar's character? It seems to me that we 
all should face a fundamental extension in the 
definition of a scholar, away from the individ- 
ual, the selfish, out to the social and con- 
structive. 

In our educational institutions scholarship has 
three functions: To broaden the field of exist- 
ing knowledge, and the war has shown us that 
every field has its valuable practical applications; 
to train the coming generation of experts, and 
any country needs not only a handful of distin- 
guished leaders but a great body of well-trained 
men and women who, when the emergency arises, 
stand ready to meet it; and last but not least, 
to inspire a recognition of what scholarship is 
and a respect for it in the minds of the general 

87 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

students, few of whom, by the most generous 
stretch of the imagination, can be regarded as 
scholars themselves, but whose influence in their 
generation throughout the country is a very im- 
portant factor. Our nation needs a respect for 
expert knowledge and it needs a respect for in- 
telligence, and our college graduates can do more 
than any other group to develop this respect. 

We have taken up three of our four lessons as 
these affect the university: the emphasis on 
youth, the need of mobilization and team play, 
and the need of leadership. There remains the 
fourth factor, a high, clear-cut aim. 

The most serious charge against the American 
undergraduate in the past has been the lack 
of a sense of responsibility. We now know 
from their war records that the sense of re- 
sponsibility lay latent in thousands of these 
boys and was only awaiting an impulse suffi- 
ciently strong to arouse it. 

President Hibben of Princeton, who ought to 
know the American undergraduate if anybody 
does, said recently: ''Young men are capable 
of far greater amounts of intensive work day in 
and day out than we had dreamed of; capable 
of greater concentration of mind upon their 

88 



WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED? 

tasks. They respond more quickly than we 
have conceived to the call of duty. The sense 
of responsibility is there latent, and we teachers 
must endeavor to quicken and to appeal to it. 
We have seen that when the occasion comes 
these young men rise to meet it." 

We can't very well stage a world war for the 
purpose, and I don't think we need wait for 
any such crisis to bring it out. There is in 
every normal, wholesome-minded student some 
motor nerve that can be touched in such a way 
as to release that type of coordinated energy 
which we call a sense of responsibility. This 
all goes back to knowing our men and women 
and establishing human contacts and human 
confidences. 

In spite of individual disappointments, and as 
a college dean, I have had my share, I am 
confident that the normal young American 
either already possesses as a motive force some 
worth-v/hile aim or that he can be guided 
toward such an aim if approached in the right 
way. 

Let me quote a paragraph or so from the 
report of the War Department Committee on 
Education : 

^'Because the war did completely organize 
89 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

the nation for a united drive and thus did ex- 
pose a magnificent national morale, many are 
inclined to believe that war is necessary to call 
forth such consecration and self-forgetful service. 
Analysis of the war training, however, reveals 
a point of view and a method of procedure that 
is definitely designed to develop team-play and 
to enhance morale whether there be war or not. 
If these methods are applied to education in 
times of peace, they certainly will produce some 
effect even though the result is not as pro- 
foundly striking as it was during the war. 
Among the many significant features of war 
training, the following are mentioned as worthy 
of particular consideration for transfer to school 
practice : 

^'As a primary policy, a nation at war is 
obliged to recognize that every individual is 
an asset capable of useful service in some par- 
ticular line of work of direct benefit to the coun- 
try. In order to make the most efficient use 
of all its resources, it is necessary to make 
strenuous exertions to discover what each in- 
dividual is best qualified to do and to train 
each to use his abilities in the most effective 
manner. Applied to education this fundamental 
attitude produces two results that are of im- 

90 



WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED? 

portance in the development of morale. The 
teacher's point of view shifts from a critical 
one, with attention focused on discovering 
whether the individual measures up to the 
academic standards fixed by school authorities, 
to one of friendly, not to say eager interest to 
discover what each individual really can do 
well. The student's spirit also changes from 
one of discouragement and doubt of his ability 
ever to make good, to one of interest and desire 
for achievement. Both of these results are 
of large importance in releasing energy for both 
the teacher and the student. They also have 
an immediate bearing on the enhancement of 
morale" 

In any place of campaign to this end within a 
college or university, the first thing to do is 
to build around that vague but very real emo- 
tion called college spirit, to supplement this by 
guiding our young people to enlist in worth- 
while, nation-wide or world-wide causes (we 
are singularly provincial about this in America), 
and by ensuring better teaching and super- 
vision and better coordination of work. 

There is no question that we have underesti- 
mated both the American undergraduate's capacity 
for intellectual work and his real pleasure in it 

91 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

when he feels it worth while. One of my 
friends was telling me of his experiences as 
commanding officer of one of the ground 
schools for aviators, where a large proportion 
of the candidates were college undergraduates, 
and I asked him if he had had any troubles as 
to discipline. '^Yes indeed/' he replied, '^ night 
after night we'd catch some fellows studying 
with a peep-light under their blankets, after 
taps had sounded." 

Any doubts as to the instinctive reaction of 
the normal, healthy young American toward 
educational opportunities were dispelled by the 
experiences of the army in France after the 
armistice. The let-down, after the terrific phys- 
ical and emotional strain, the impatience regard- 
ing any delay as to return home, combined to 
make a pretty serious situation as to the morale 
of our troops. After some misguided and 
nearly disastrous experiments as to the cura- 
tive properties of heavy drill and strict disci- 
pline, the A.E.F. recognized the necessity for 
a prompt and thorough stimulation of all the 
welfare activities, and a real educational pro- 
gram; and it was straight, old-fashioned book- 
work more than it was the movies, or athletics, 
more even than Miss Elsie Janis, which turned 

92 



WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED? 

the corner for us. In all, more than 200,000 
men volunteered for the privilege of studying. 
The military order was often reversed and 
majors sat at the feet of the corporals or pri- 
vates who had been selected as teachers. The 
reports as to the intensity of the work of teach- 
ers and students alike should put any of us 
professionals to shame. 

Just now we are hearing a great deal about 
the benefits of discipline. I think what the 
speakers are really talking about, though they 
don't recognize it themselves, is the benefit of 
the state of mind which accepts and welcomes 
discipline. We are not, even as the result of 
the war, a disciplined people in the sense that 
Germany is, or was, and we can thank God 
for it. We shall never want in this country a 
general subordination of the individual will and 
initiative to external control. Discipline is a 
means and not an end. If discipline, as such, 
externally imposed, were so important a factor 
in success as many people seem to think to- 
day, we could look through a list of ex-enlisted 
men in the army and navy — I mean the men 
enlisted and discharged during peace time — 
and find a relatively large number who made 

93 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

conspicuously good records after returning to 
civil life. As a matter of fact, we find nothing 
of the kind. 

What we do find is that not a few enlisted men 
who chose the army or the navy as their per- 
manent career have won commissions and made 
fine records. There were no better general 
officers in the war than men like Harbord of 
our army and Robertson of the British, both of 
whom rose from the ranks. But isn't it fair to 
say that the discipline imposed on these men was 
accepted gladly and accepted in the terms of their 
fundamental interest, and that these men are not 
really exceptions to what I have said? 

I venture to predict that there will be a very 
different record to tell as to the success in civil 
life of those men now leaving the Army, who, 
because they believed in the cause and wished 
to participate to the full in the great enterprise, 
gladly submitted themselves to the discipline for 
the purpose of increasing their efficiency. 

In a month or so you can teach an enthusiastic 
man, who is fired by a big idea, all the disci- 
pline he needs for carrying out his duties and 
profiting by his opportunities, but you can't 
reverse the process and incite enthusiasms as 
a result of the application of discipline. 

94 



WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED? 

Don't think that I want to minimize the 
merits of military discipline for military pur- 
poses. Of course, coordination and subordina- 
tion are absolutely necessary in the handling of 
large bodies of men. Even the men in France 
who deserted to the front, as many of them 
did, no matter how much we may sympathize 
with their desire to get into the game, had to 
be disciplined. Someone had to stay behind 
and see to the supplies. The point we are dis- 
cussing is the carrying over of this principle of 
military discipline intact into civilian life. So 
far as discipline brings about regularity of life, 
of exercise, so long as it ministers to alertness, 
we can use it, but as between discipline on the 
one hand, and initiative and team play on the 
other, to meet our academic or our national 
needs, I am for initiative and team play. 

Please don't misunderstand me. By reducing 
the present emphasis on external discipline, 
after childhood has been passed, I don't mean 
a lowering of standards. External discipline, it 
seems to me, is often really imposed as a sub- 
stitute for high standards; something supposed 
to be just as good and more easy to keep in 
stock. The standards of the worth-while or- 
ganization, and these are the outward expression 

95 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

of its aims, its ideals, ought to be high enough 
and intelligently enough administered to make 
sure that the men and women who are unable 
to provide their own discipline, should in the 
general interest be painlessly but promptly 
removed from the group. 

Here is a credo for the American people, from 
the pen of a regular army officer. It's a 
pretty good one for an American University: 
''To foster individual talent, imagination and 
initiative, to couple with this a high degree of 
cooperation, and to subject these to a not too 
minute direction; the whole vitalized by a 
supreme purpose, which serves as the magic 
key to unlock the upper strata of the energies 
of men.'' 

Finally, let me try to apply these lessons to 
you young men and women of the graduating 
class. 

Keep in good physical shape. Over-work is 
usually a combination of bad air, bad feeding, 
and lack of exercise and sleep. See that you 
don't go stale. If you lack the zest of life, find 
out what the trouble is; whether it is your teeth 
or your liver or your soul. Picture to yourself 
w^hat Theodore Roosevelt got out of life. 

96 



WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED? 

Be honest with yourself. Do your own 
thinking and do it straight. This, strangely 
enough, is perhaps the thing which you will find 
hardest to do after the undergraduate atmos- 
phere. A student body is, or at any rate was 
before the war, the most convention ridden 
group of which I have any knowledge. I am 
all for conventions, because they save a great 
deal of time and worry, but only so far as we 
recognize them as conventions and do not exalt 
them into principles or philosophical truths. 
Remember that the public opinion of America 
is an infinitely more important thing to the 
world than ever before, and that you are each 
to be a part of it. 

Keep your intellectual interests and your 
interest in your alma mater, not in her athletics 
and her fraternities alone. Remember that as 
alumni of this University you are citizens of 
no mean city. Recruit men and women whom 
she ought to have and who ought to have her, 
remembering that the danger to this country 
from the inside, and it is no inconsiderable 
danger, is mainly due to the misdirected zeal 
of sincere people who lack knowledge and 
background. Take for example the employer 
who can't see beyond the point of telling his 

97 



SOME WAR-TIME LESSONS 

men to 'Hake it or leave it," and the workman 
whose sense of real or fancied injustice has 
brought him to what with our children we know 
as the kicking and biting stage. It is too late 
to do much with the present adult generation 
except by main strength and awkwardness, but 
a recruit for higher education from either of 
these groups is a good national investment. 

Keep your human contacts. Don't be a 
^^glad-hander" but do at least your share. It 
takes two to make and keep alive a friendship, 
just as it does a quarrel. There is something 
worth while in everyone. Give yourself a chance 
to find what it is. Practice following and, as 
the chance comes to you, practice leading, but 
above all, practice team play. Keep yourself 
ready to take the next step, whatever it may 
be. There is a story of Marshal Joffre, of 
which I can at least say that it is good enough 
to be true. After the first battle of the Marne 
some enthusiast was proclaiming him as a second 
Napoleon and laying it on pretty thick. The 
old gentleman stood it as long as he could and 
then said: ''No, Napoleon would have known 
what to do next, and I don't." 

Keep your enthusiasms and your ideals. In 
other words, keep your youth. In choosing 

98 



WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED? 

your life work, get into something in which the 
poHcy and practice are such that you can throw 
your whole soul into the job. Don^t take your- 
self seriously, but take your opportunities for 
usefulness seriously. Find out the callings in 
which America is short. There are plenty of 
them, as the war has shown. Think over 
whether it isn't possible for you to be one of 
the men or one of the women who, from your 
training and momentum and vision, will be 
selected ten or fifteen or twenty years hence, 
to take on some important job, with the nation 
as your client, as the one person best qualified 
to fill it. 

We no longer have to prove that it pays to 
know, to really know almost anything that is 
worth while. It pays in money, if that is what 
one wants; it pays in the more enduring sat- 
isfactions of life, in the pleasure that comes 
from exact knowledge and intellectual pioneering, 
in the almost unique joy of creation without 
the responsibilities of possession, and in the 
feeling of individual readiness to be of use in 
meeting the problems which the years allotted 
to your generation will surely bring forth. 



99 



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